Bay of Plenty locals rally to oppose bottling Mega Plants

This coming Sunday at 12 midday a protest is to be
held on Omanu Beach, and over 1000 people have signed up to
join it with numbers building daily including families, kids
and college environment groups.

The protest is called 2400
bottles on the beach. 2400 is the number of single use
plastic bottles that just one of the plants will be capable
of creating every minute, and the first consented plant
(Otakiri) has been granted licence to operate 24 hours a
day, 6 days a week. That is a total of just under half a
billion bottles per year.

Times that by at least two more
mega plants who are also sizing up the area and you have a
tsunami of plastic, many residents of The Bay do not want to
be famous for generating as much plastic water bottles as
England currently consumes in a year.

On top of the
plastic waste issue is the fact that the plants will
generate an estimated 500 trucks per day heading to port on
an already congested transport network.

People plan to
gather at 12 mid-day on the beach with used plastic bottles
inscribed with a message. The balance of 2400 bottles will
be brought on site from the local refuse centre.

Locals
are outraged that the consent for the Otakiri plant
expansion has not been publicly notified and most of the
community have been in the dark about the scale of the
industry. The protest is timed to take place one day before
the appeal hearing against the Otakiri Plant, a hearing that
has been crowd sourced by local community group, Sustainable
Otakiri.

As we head towards ecological crisis, the
community demands accountability for this type of decision
making and are calling for urgent reform of our water
resource laws to protect our precious resource and to ask
Council and NZTE to take the full environmental costs in to
the business case when deciding to grant permission for new
industries to set up shop in our
communities.

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